I loved football. Never played it, but I was a devoted fan. Every Saturday, I’d watch my Michigan Wolverines play. Every win would bring a high and every loss would devastate me.

This year’s Super Bowl was the first whole game I’ve watched in years.

It isn’t about missing it or growing out of it. I’m not distracted or finding something else to do. I can’t devote myself to something that is causing so much harm to the young men playing it.

The diagnosis of CTE in the brain of the late Wide Receiver, Vincent Jackson is just the latest example of something we’ve known for the better part of a decade.

Football is killing people.

The difference is that we are fortunate in not seeing it ourselves.

But the people who are seeing it are the loved ones left behind. Traumatic brain injury is robbing spouses, children, parents, cousins, friends of happy, generous, thoughtful people. And many of the ones who aren’t dying are being transformed over time into strangers.

We can’t keep ignoring this. The evidence is overwhelming.

It is no longer moral to encourage anyone play football.

As a former major fan, this is really hard for me to say. It is simply a response to the situation.

And as we’ve known about the problem for years, we’ve done what we are used to doing: making it a personal choice. We think it is their choice to play or my choice to watch. Not that there isn’t some interconnected human responsibility to protect our neighbors. Or that we aren’t all connected by schools, hospitals, community services, and civic responsibility. Just vague notions of personal liberty and individual responsibility.

We’ve known how bad it is. We’ve known that high school students have CTE. It isn’t just professionals. It’s kids. Offensive lineman were just the tip of the spear. It’s also wide receivers and quarterbacks. It isn’t based on the number of concussions but the numbers of reps. Practice reps.

High school kids all over the country are getting enough collisions in practice to cause permanent, severe brain damage.

The scale of this is mind-boggling.

Now it is safe to say that the number of people with CTE is easily in the tens of thousands. Perhaps hundreds of thousands. Teens and young adults, middle-aged adults and seniors. People who are facing greater challenges as their brains struggle to function properly because of damage which began when they were 12. And then they pounded and pounded and pounded the tackle dummies over and over in practice.

The scale of CTE is mind-boggling. And it is precisely that we treat it like thousands of personal problems and not a web of a single, interconnected problem, that makes it chronic and unyielding.

This is a problem we face.

It isn’t whether or not you send your kid out for football. It is that we have done next to nothing to prevent this in our communities, our states, and our country. We have done precious little to protect our kids.

This is an us problem.

It effects nearly every community, every high school, every hospital: we just can’t see it yet. Because we aren’t willing to see it yet.

And when world-class athletes keep dying in their thirties with brains broken by football, we cannot keep looking away.

We as a people have run out of excuses.